"Nothing is more
common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the
ideas they stand for."
--John Henry
Newman
"A liberal education is not something any of us ever achieve; it is not a state.
Rather, it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward
wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any
illusions that our education will ever be complete."
--William Cronon
"I think I am not alone is fearing that the traditional aims of liberal education,
reduced to the ideal
of general education or core curriculum, have lost their punch. They are too frequently
viewed by students as add-ons,
nuisances in the road to specialized learning. They are perceived as mechanical
contrivances, intended to correct the
tendency of learning to move in the direction of specialization, epicycles in a system
which has spun badly out of balance."
--Stanley N. Katz
"[The purpose of a liberal arts education is to] open the mind, to correct it, to
refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest,
master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application,
flexibility, method, critical exactness,
sagacity, resource, address, [and] eloquent expression. . . ."
--John Henry
Newman
"Increasingly the boundaries between general education and the major are becoming
blurred. Some institutions are acting on their realization that the broad and ambitious
goals of general education cannot
be met within a small set of discrete courses and are asking both the majors and the
co-curriculum to take on some of those
responsibilities. At many other institutions, upper level integrative general education
courses are taught in ways that intersect and enrich the advanced learning in the
major. The rapid growth of interdisciplinary majors and minors accelerates this
integrative trend."
--C.G. Schneider &
R. Shoenberg
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Readings
on a Liberal Education
updated 18 July 2002
The Aims of Education,
excerpt from Chapter One
by Alfred North Whitehead, 1929
Can Liberal Education
Cope?
by Stanley N. Katz, October 1997
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
Contemporary
Reflections on the University
(a bibliography)
Contemporary
Understandings of Liberal Education,
Carol Geary Schneider and Robert Shoenberg
AAC&U, June 1998
<full
text of report as PDF file>
History
of the University
(a bibliography)
How a Broad Education in the Liberal Arts
Prepares Students for Today's Job Market,
by Nelson Smith, 1996
National Alliance of Business
The Idea of a
University, abridged
John Henry Newman, 1854
The Idea of a
University (after John Henry Newman),
by Anne Carson, McGill University
Threepenny Review, Summer 1999
The Idea of the University: Take One--On
the Genius of This Place
by Donald N. Levine
(University of Chicago, 2000)
Liberal Arts and Liberal Education,
by Christopher Flannery, 1998
The Claremont Institute
Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First
Century,
by W. R. Connor,
Director of the National Humanities Center
A Liberal Education Agenda for
the 1990s and Beyond
on the Twin Cities Campus of the University of Minnesota
Final Report of the Twin Cities Task Force on
Liberal Education, May 1991
Liberal Education and American
Schooling,
PhD Dissertation by Thomas R. McCambridge
UCLA 1997
A Liberal Education and Where to
Find It,
T. H. Huxley, 1868
Liberal Ideals and
Vocational Aims in University Legal Education,
by Gerry Johnstone, University of Hull
Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 1999
'Only
Connect': The Goals of a Liberal Education,
by William Cronon,
American Scholar, Autumn 1998
On the Purpose of a Liberal Arts
Education,
by Robert Harris, March 1991
Vanguard University of Southern California
On Shadows and Realities
in Education
The Republic, Book Seven
by Plato
Philosophy of Liberal Education,
a bibliography (with links to online texts) compiled by Andrew Chrucky,
University of Chicago
Politics, Book
Eight
by Aristotle
The Ultimate Despair of Liberal
Education,
by Lynn Varco with contributions from W. Joshua Lucas
The Chicago Maroon, February 1993
What Is Liberal Education?
by Mortimer Adler,
Center for the Study of Great Ideas
"The University, I will claim, no longer participates in the historical
project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of
culture. Such a claim also raises some significant questions of its own: Is this a new age
dawning for the University as a project, or does it mark the twilight of the University's
critical and social function? And if it is the twilight, then what does that mean?"
Bill Readings, The
University in Ruins (1998)
"Today it is necessary to sharpen . . . the polemical point that utilitarianism is a
threat to utility, and that therefore a rigid application of the utilitarian criterion
could deprive the next generation of the very means it will need for the tasks that it
will face, which will not be the tasks that this generation faces and which therefore
cannot be dealt with by those particular instrumentalities that this generation has
identified as 'useful.'"
Jaroslav Pelikan. The
Idea of a University: A Reexamination, 1991
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